How a '90s 'right-wing populist revolt' paved the way for Trumpism

18 June 2024

Never Trump conservatives often hail the late 1980s and early 1990s as a great time for Reagan conservatism.

President George H.W. Bush was voted out of office in 1992, when Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton successfully attacked him on the economy.

But before the U.S. went into a recession, Bush enjoyed stellar approval ratings. And many Never Trumpers have said that he exemplified the type of dignity that Donald Trump lacks.

In an interview for Mother Jones published on June 18, however, author John Ganz argues that the early 1990s saw a "right-wing populist revolt" that helped paved the way for Trumpism.

The "populists" Ganz specifically mentions range from Patrick Buchanan and Texas billionaire Ross Perot — both of whom ran for president in 1992 — to libertarian Murray Rothbard and white supremacist David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991.

Ganz told Mother Jones, "Ross Perot, first of all, surrounded himself in this myth of Americana — the Norman Rockwell stuff, all the cowboy stuff…. And he represented the kind of person who could cut through Washington bureaucracy and red tape. There's obviously a lot of resonance between that and Trump."

According to Ganz — author of the book " When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s" — Buchanan's 1992 campaign had "uncanny resemblances to Trump's run in 2016."

Ganz told Mother Jones, "It's not just an attack on conservatives, it's an attack on the Republican establishment as being a part of an unaccountable elite that doesn't have the interests of mostly white, middle-Americans at heart…. A lot of these people did lose the kinds of positions of prominence during the Reagan era that went to neoconservatives and also more moderate voices in the GOP. They felt that they represented the true American right and had been passed over."

Mother Jones' full interview with John Ganz is available at this link.

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